Monday, November 14, 2016

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to
her book The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Two world wars in one generation, separated by an
uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty
for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the
anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This
moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died.
We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all
its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who
have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions
and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse
conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same
phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an
unprecedented depth.

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we
depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules
of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if
judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided
itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that
everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those
for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.“

To read these words, one may have the strange feeling of a déjà
vu with the election of Donald Trump to the presidential office of the United
States of America.Though we do not have
the two World Wars our experience is neatly sandwiched between Operation Desert
Storm and the seemingly endless and ongoing oil wars in the Middle East, with a
chain of revolutions, wars, skirmishes and crises in between (Arab Spring,
Ukraine, etc), all redoubled with the largest mass movement of refugees in
recent history. Homelessness and uprootedness dominate the current discourse
with an increased drive toward the traditionalist nationalist narrative as
things take a wider turn toward the populist politics of the conservative right
precisely because certain sections of the populace want to return to the Edenic
origins from which we supposedly arrived, where gay, lesbian, trans, metro, liberal,
vegan, gluten free atheists were simple fancies and where real men and women
took part in the daily routine of tilling and farming the earth or making stuff
in factories only to come home to sleep in separate beds and where business
oligarchs made dreams possible by engineering comforts into reality and made
everyone else wealthy and prosperous at the same time.

If history is any sort of coordinate, and in America it
rarely is because for some strange reason America prides itself on its
ignorance of history and geography, it certainly should be now. Both history
and geography are inexplicably absent from the discourse of American
politics.History is treated as quaint
and useless while geography is presented as something almost un-American
because should any normal American show signs of knowledge in this area it
would almost certainly be perceived as a cowtailing to the politics and
hegemony of others. To an average American, Czech Republic remains
Czechoslovakia 24 years after this state broke into Slovakia and the Czech
Republic. It is a detachment signifying
a distance not only ideological but intellectual, but one that does not come
from simple stupidity, most Americans are actually not complete idiots, it
seems to come from a type of strength of self-identity that governs the
dealings of most US politicians with other nations, it is an arrogant hubris
that is normal in the US and completely illogical, inexplicable and dangerous
to everyone else.Interestingly enough,
in Czech Republic the leading politicians have embraced Trump on the simple
premise that he, unlike other presidents before him, actually knows where Czech
Republic is, given that he seems to hunt for his love interests in the waters
of Eastern Europe.

To be certain I have treated the American political campaign
with a completely identical distance, observing most of the events leading up
to the election from the high tower of detachment. The campaigns of both
Clinton and Trump seemed unreal most of the time and like jokes during others,
Clinton the supposedly decent and calculating candidate whose first order of
business was to save face at all costs, Trump the crazy nationalist press whore
to whom all sorts of attention, positive or negative, is equally valuable.Trump does not have a drug of choice and does
not discriminate between what type of fix his he gets, he accepts them all
sight unseen.During all of this, both
Clinton and Trump have been called fascist, but now that we know that Trump is
going to be the next president, we should analyze whether or how this label
applies.To be sure and in light of the
information that we have on both, the danger posed by each candidate as
president can be summed up this way, Trump is dangerous potentially and Clinton
actually, Clinton is after all tied to the Military Industrial Complex, while
Trump’s only famous political stunt was as a Birther.

Thou Sayeth Fascist
and Thou Shalt Receive

Of course the problem is that fascist, if we want to be
completely specific, is a term applied to the ideology of the Italian system of
government under Benito Mussolini, yet like Nazi, the term has been loosely
thrown at anyone whose political stance is different from one’s own in order to
discredit them.For many years the term
corporatist was used pejoratively in an attempt to replace the term fascist but
with limited success.Corporatist just
does not sound dirty enough.But where
the term Nazi fails because it’s been properly profaned by intellectuals and
idiots alike, the word fascist remains an acceptable term for everyday use.In its simplest iteration the words fascist
and corporatist signify an absolute interconnectedness between the worlds of
business (banks, corporations, technologies, etc) and government, making them
indistinguishable from one another, with a third external component in the
church.What Fascism also signifies is a
movement toward a totality in which all three worlds that make up the day to
day happenings in which most of us move, with little chance of escape or wiggle
room for alternatives.The idea is that
by combining these three world into a seamless whole, preferably under a single
party rule, the entire apparatus would move smoothly, society would be totally
administered, business able to police itself, ideology left to the church and government’s
sole purpose would be to protect both worlds from the people through the rule
of law, written specifically for the worlds of business and the church by the
government. Trump’s Mussolini-like act behind the podium seems to suggest that
the movement is certainly one toward a corporate agenda, though he will
certainly be hard pressed to make himself into an absolute ruler in a
government that is still operational under certain checks and balances.But the success of Trump’s campaign certainly
deserves attention.

I for one was certain that Clinton was going to win the
election and that there will be little surprise on the morning of November the
9th.I am interested in
seeing the day after, when the so called revolution realizes that it is now the
establishment.Trump’s political
campaign was an iteration of Bush’s campaign, as both presented themselves as
anti-establishment outsiders, when both were neither.Both were able to mobilize sections of
American society from which neither originated but decided to speak to and in
their stead.When looking at the states
that Trump was able to carry it is apparent that he made use of those who on
the whole seemed voiceless.Arendt
points out that Hitler’s rise to power in Germany wasn’t simply a carefully
organized conspiracy of a select few powerful men, he in fact depended on his
own popularity with the people. He was
able to mobilize the ‘volk’ because he was the only one that paid any attention
to them. It was they who stood with him
because no other politician did. Hitler focused his attention on those that
previously had no political experience or power, the seemingly disenfranchised
multitude that was everywhere yet apparently entirely voiceless and forgotten.The Communists in Russia did as Hitler did,
with similar results.

“It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in
Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited
their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other
parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The
result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people never
before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of
entirely new methods into political propaganda and indifference to the arguments
of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and
against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never
been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system.”

Trump was apparently able to give a voice to a section of
the population in the predominantly democratic but depressed rust belt states
in the north like Michigan. The polls
showed overwhelming numbers in support of Clinton, but did anyone bother to leave
the cities or the swing states and ask the people there? Everyone was so sure of a Clinton victory that
even the Republicans for a while did not believe that Trump actually won. Where
Clinton’s surplus political power came from the gender gap, Trump focused his
on class, precisely where Hitler was so successful. Despite the increasing
race, gender, and culture wars being waged in the US, Trump was able to
capitalize on the thing that trumps (pardon the pun) them both. If Clinton
believes, like her husband, that ‘it’s the economy stupid,’ then Trump is
betting on class relations. To be sure, the ‘volk’ that voted Trump into office
were indeed mostly white and mostly rural, but not entirely, there were black,
white, Latino, upper, lower, middle class voters that turned out, more Latino
and black voters came out to vote for Trump than they did for Romney, yet they
all seemed to have voted in order to gain a voice and not with their wallets
the way they did with Bush.Ironically
they cast a vote for someone who along with Clinton is least likely to actually
give them the time of day, for in order to cast a vote for someone that truly
spoke to and for them would have been to vote for no one, no such choice ever
existed. Trump’s nostalgically utopian slogan spelled out the tragic reality of
America today, since America was great only in its specific iterations when in
service to a specific race and class of its citizenry. Again, no such greatness
ever existed when projected onto a global scale, if it did, it existed merely
as a mediated image, an iteration of Trumpism dressed in 1980s fashion and hair
styles dipped in gallons of hair spray. A second irony dwells in the sad prediction
that Trump may indeed make the US ‘great’ again by ‘fixing’ the economy, an
iteration of Hitler’s economic miracle, propped up and supported by American
and European banks and wealthiest families.Trump is a business man, the nostalgic superhero of the American
middle-class, sweeping in from the chaos of the streets like Batman, waging war
with allegorical enemies, the entire source of his wealth owed to his father
and eventually propped up by banks who bailed him out when times were
lean.Trump is filthy rich, but not
necessarily from his real estate dealings, he owns very little, but rather from
the selling of his name and his act, Trump is a master at branding and
entertainment. Trump’s ridiculous
pronouncements take on an air of foreboding when seen through the historicist
lens of Arendt.

“For the propaganda of totalitarian movements which precede
and accompany totalitarian regimes is invariably as frank as it is mendacious,
and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of
their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”

Thou Shalt Laugh at
Your Neighbor’s Misfortune

Make no mistake, Trump is a genius manipulator, but he is no
strategist.He shoots from the hip
rather than carefully organizes his every thought, he has others do that for
him, yet all the top totalitarian leaders employed coaches, aides and
consultants, to teach them proper form in public, from Hitler, to Kim Jong Un.
To be sure, I draw on the similarities between the ideology put forward by
Trump and the existing fascist ideology of the 20th century modernist
era knowing full well that there is a world of difference between the two.
Trump is not Hitler, and Trumpism isn’t fascism.I draw on Arendt’s work in order to highlight
knowledge already apparent in hindsight of the actions of fascists and the
flirtation with the words and images of said fascism by Donald Trump. It was
already in the early 1920s when social commentators noticed something wrong in
the population of Europe.Where from came
the need and desire for a strong leader and one party rule? The danger of the
Reds was purely virtual as far as Europe outside of Soviet Russia was concerned.
Yellow Journalism was at its height and industrialist tycoon-run newspapers,
opposed to the wave of liberalism and hedonism sweeping Europe and America,
countered with remorseless trumped up attacks, making all sort of things
illegal from marijuana to Communism. The liberals and the left caved and the
nationalist right ushered in an unprecedented era of human suffering and
destruction.

Today’s left is continuing its struggle with itself. It lost
its way during the 1960s and was not able to regain its footing, deferring to a
set of outmoded prescriptions without so much as a modicum of self-reflexivity,
instead blaming the outcomes of elections on the idiocy of the electorate.The left should have been able to prop up
Sanders toward the presidency, instead it decided to moan and complain about
the corrupt Clinton campaign that swept him off his perch during the primary.In 2011 it seemed that the left was
reemerging from the swamps of history with the Occupy Movement, but in 2016
this wet dream finally turned into a sobering reality as the redeeming quality
of grassroots movements oriented toward populist ideas morphed into sentiments
of xenophobic nationalism. The irony is,
of course, that the left had by this time completely evacuated its discourse of
critical thinking and above all of actual cold hard facts, let me rephrase
that, the left had in fact directed critical thinking toward a defense of its
position instead of putting forth a clear outline of its ideas, ideals and
ideology, allowing for the manipulation of data, facts and stats by the
opposition to go unchecked. The left had instead focused its gaze on the nebulous
idea of multiculturalism and a type of reverse racism, clothed as white
guilt.It took less than ten years,
roughly corresponding with the rise of the smart phone and the distribution of
Google and the iPhone to every home and hamlet in a quasi-socialist manner, for
the typical Joe and Jane to be on the one hand mortally offended by any
deviation in the normalized speech and dress and on the other to be scared witless
for not knowing whether they themselves have deviated in some way from the
clearly outlined coordinates of acceptable mannerisms. Political correctness
does have a place, mostly in an academic setting where a set of rules for
conduct level the playing field and establish a standard of correctness. One
has to wonder how and why was political correctness used as a straightjacket of
western populations?

It is interesting to see when a feminist like Camille Paglia
or black conservative Larry Elder hack away the myths of modern feminism and white
privilege respectively, using simple numbers and facts, the left doesn’t know
how to react and instead resorts to a wholesale ad hominem attack, hence the
attacks on Donald Trump and a kind of strangely revolting acceptance of Clinton
despite the overwhelming facts pointing to her as simply a George W. Bush in drag.To be sure, the disinterested approach of
cold hard facts and sober realism of the right is just as alienating and empty
as the passionate appeal to humanity from the left.What we witnessed during the last election
cycle and especially in the last few hours before the results were actually
called was a tragedy turned into a comedy. The seemingly endless tears
streaming from the faces of disillusioned voters, the ridiculous vague open
letters compelling readers toward unity and tolerance during hard times, the
smugness of the wannabe industrialist victor, the awkward fall of the politico-military
puppet backed by banks and the media were sweet music to the ears of all those
who already gave the finger during the DNC.Both parties have left most of the people neck deep in the dust of the
techno-industrial wasteland and now they are slowly figuring out how to pull
the plug on the rest. To have a hearty laugh at the expense of liberal apparatchiks
or the conservative proletariat, both deeply troubling and paradoxical
positions, is the only form of therapy that is and will be left when the doors
of corporate America finally shuts its doors to the outside world. In some
strange schadefreude way I am looking forward to the presidency of Donald
Trump, the reality star buffoon with an orange toupee.But did we not see this before?Who still recalls the presidency of George W.
Bush and his famous one liners, the stupefying lunacy of Sarah Palin, the
muscle-flexing pronouncements of B-movie western cowboy Ronald Reagan? Donald
Trump did actually achieve a first with his election, he is the first president
we can watch on YouTube get roasted by SnoopDog. The Republicans have endless
hours of horrifying entertainment in the National Archives and it will be a
strange pleasure to witness the history of an American political reality show
taking center stage from the Oval Office.The question is, who will be the celebrity judge when we will first see
Trump give Berlusconi a run for his money in pomposity, and how long will it
take before somebody yells out ‘you’re fired’ at a presidential press
conference?